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Covid inquiry: Johnson moaned UK was ‘too s**t to get our act together’, says Patrick Vallance [1]
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Date: 2023-11
Boris Johnson sat “head in hands” and said “we are too shit to get our act together” during a meeting as Covid spiked in September 2020, according to Patrick Vallance.
In his evidence session at the Covid inquiry this morning, more diary entries from the former chief scientific adviser were shown highlighting the government’s indecision at the height of the pandemic.
“5 hrs of meetings with the PM. He came back from Battle of Britain memorial service and was distressed by seeing everyone separated and in masks – ‘mad and spooky, we have got to end it’,” an entry from 20 September 2020 stated.
It went on: “Looked broken – head in hands a lot. ‘Is it because of the great libertarian nation we are that it spreads so much.’ ‘Maybe we are licked as a species’ – ‘We are too shit to get our act together.’ We went round in circles and then the famous whiteboard emerges.”
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The diary entry also noted Johnson was “challenging numbers and questioning whether they really translate to deaths”.
Earlier, another diary entry had been shown in which Vallance wrote that getting the former PM to understand the science during the pandemic was “awful” and that it was “hard work" to make him comprehend “what a particular graph or piece of data” meant during discussions in which scientific advice was given to politicians and advisers.
“Watching the PM get his head around stats is awful,” an entry from June 2020 read. “He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.”
Another from February 2021 read: “[Johnson] taken through graphs but it was a real struggle to get him to understand them.”
An entry from September 2020 said: “Claire Gardiner [director general of the Joint Biosecurity Centre] talked PM through graphs (it is difficult – he asks questions like ‘which line is the dark red one’ – is he colour blind?), then: ‘So you think positivity has gone up overnight oh oh’ then ‘Oh god, bloody hell’ but it is all the same stuff he was shown 6h ago.”
When asked whether Johnson “completely misunderstood some of the advice that you've given him,” Vallance said it was “possible”.
“I can't be sure that he kept it in his mind all the time,” he added.
Vallance said as the pandemic went on, “unwelcome advice” from scientific advisers wasn’t read properly.
“The 2-meter rule meeting made it abundantly clear that no one in Number 10 or the Cabinet Office had really read or taken time to understand the scientific advice…quite extraordinary,” a diary entry shows.
Vallance added: “Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings were extremely keen to get scientific advice…but as you can see it wasn't always easy to provide it in a way that was understood and actionable by the prime minister.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/boris-johnson-covid-inquiry-patrick-vallance/
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